Nine Lives by Dan Baum Death and Life in New Orleans

Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of night unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings the kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.

Dan Baum is the author of Nine Lives, Smoke and Mirrors, and Citizen Coors. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written for Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Nine Lives

Kirkus Reviews

Employing appropriately florid prose and a novelistic approach to narrative, Baum masterfully conveys sympathy, compassion and, most importantly, a critical understanding of an oft-misunderstood city that stands as an important pocket of American culture.

The New York Times

The Washington Post

With such a wide cast -- including the wife of a Mardi Gras Indian, a high school band leader and a bar owner who makes the surgical shift from a "he" to a "she" -- Baum has rich material to dramatize his case that New Orleans is utterly unlike mainstream America.

Christian Science Monitor

“By almost any metric,” writes New Yorker correspondent Dan Baum, New Orleans is “the worst city in the United States.” It has “the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most corrupt and brutal cops.”

Open Letters Monthly

The family is perfectly American, a mix of old and new south: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American immigrant, his wife Kathy Delphine from Baton Rouge, and their five children, one of which is from Kathy’s first marriage.

Bookmarks Magazine

Verna Noel Jones
Critical Summary
Since 2005, Hurricane Katrina and its immediate effects on New Orleans have been documented in numerous books, such as Breach of Faith, 3.5 of 5 Stars Nov/Dec 2006, and The Great Deluge, 3.5 of 5 Stars Nov/Dec 2006.

truthdig

“It is ironic,” observes Fontanella-Khan, “that the woman who has helped empower so many women across Bundelkhand was not able to protect her own daughters from the hell of child marriage.” The author adds that Sampat sometimes denies her daughters’ underage marriages, and at other times acknowle...

truthdig

The real “scoop” on Bunning is that the other Kentucky senator - Mitch McConnell - HATES Bunning - says he’s a “wacko” - + is running Kentucky “badmouthing” Bunning - ruining his chances to run for re-election.

truthdig

So, too, are entries such as this early one, for Aug. 27, 1931: “At about eight in the morning we all had a shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains, and I spent most of the day reading “Eugenie Grandet.” This last is a short French novel by Balzac, and Orwell the hobo adds that it “was the only b...

Front Row Lit

Nines Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of nine unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it.